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drplaceboIt's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
The story is similar for many Japanese composers from the 1950s and 1960s: despite spending much of their time writing for the concert hall, they ended up being remembered mostly for hastily-composed film scores. (Not their own fault: the Japanese film industry was notorious for giving composers only a few days to score an entire film.) Yasushi Akutagawa (1925-1989) was no exception, known mainly as a prolific film and TV composer.
His story is a little more interesting, though. The entire Akutagawa family was active in the arts and central in the introduction of Western influences into the Japanese arts scene. Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Yasushi's father, was one of Japan's first modernist writers; his short story "In the Bush" became known in the West as the basis for the iconic Kurosawa film Rashomon. Yasushi's brother Hiroshi became known first as a Shakespearean actor and then for his appearances in a number of iconic films. Yasushi was the musician in the family. Inspired by his father's record collection, in which he especially loved the works of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, he decided in his early teens that he wanted to be a full-time composer, and enrolled in the Tokyo School of Music in 1943. He was soon conscripted and spent most of the last two years the Second World War playing in a military band. The interruption turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because he returned to school just as Akira Ifukube (best known for scoring the Godzilla films) joined the composition faculty and Akutagawa was able to take full advantage of having a well-connected mentor with a compatible musical style.
Russian composers continued to greatly influence Akutagawa's music throughout his career. In 1954, he illegally traveled to the Soviet Union, secretly studied with Dmitri Shostakovich, and became friends with Aram Khachaturian and Dmitri Kabalevsky. As a result of his time there, Akutagawa was the only Japanese composer whose works were published in the Soviet Union before the Iron Curtain fell. Other influences were decidedly cosmopolitan, ranging from serialism to Indian raga. For all his modernist influences, though, he wrote a large number of more accessible works, mostly for an amateur community orchestra he founded early in his career and continued to conduct almost until his death.
Trinita Sinfonica is one of Akutagawa's earlier works, composed in the summer of 1948 and premiered in September of the same year, and brought him his first critical acclaim. As the name suggests, it consists of three movements. The first is a quasi-sonata-form Capriccio. The second is fancifully titled "Ninnerella" and consists of two contrasting lullabies -- the title is a diminutive for an Italian word for lullaby. The piece concludes with a scherzo-like Finale that resembles nothing more than a frenzied dance.
Movements:
I. Capriccio (0:00)
II. Ninnerella (5:00)
III. Finale (15:37)
The story is similar for many Japanese composers from the 1950s and 1960s: despite spending much of their time writing for the concert hall, they ended up being remembered mostly for hastily-composed film scores. (Not their own fault: the Japanese film industry was notorious for giving composers only a few days to score an entire film.) Yasushi Akutagawa (1925-1989) was no exception, known mainly as a prolific film and TV composer.
His story is a little more interesting, though. The entire Akutagawa family was active in the arts and central in the introduction of Western influences into the Japanese arts scene. Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Yasushi's father, was one of Japan's first modernist writers; his short story "In the Bush" became known in the West as the basis for the iconic Kurosawa film Rashomon. Yasushi's brother Hiroshi became known first as a Shakespearean actor and then for his appearances in a number of iconic films. Yasushi was the musician in the family. Inspired by his father's record collection, in which he especially loved the works of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, he decided in his early teens that he wanted to be a full-time composer, and enrolled in the Tokyo School of Music in 1943. He was soon conscripted and spent most of the last two years the Second World War playing in a military band. The interruption turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because he returned to school just as Akira Ifukube (best known for scoring the Godzilla films) joined the composition faculty and Akutagawa was able to take full advantage of having a well-connected mentor with a compatible musical style.
Russian composers continued to greatly influence Akutagawa's music throughout his career. In 1954, he illegally traveled to the Soviet Union, secretly studied with Dmitri Shostakovich, and became friends with Aram Khachaturian and Dmitri Kabalevsky. As a result of his time there, Akutagawa was the only Japanese composer whose works were published in the Soviet Union before the Iron Curtain fell. Other influences were decidedly cosmopolitan, ranging from serialism to Indian raga. For all his modernist influences, though, he wrote a large number of more accessible works, mostly for an amateur community orchestra he founded early in his career and continued to conduct almost until his death.
Trinita Sinfonica is one of Akutagawa's earlier works, composed in the summer of 1948 and premiered in September of the same year, and brought him his first critical acclaim. As the name suggests, it consists of three movements. The first is a quasi-sonata-form Capriccio. The second is fancifully titled "Ninnerella" and consists of two contrasting lullabies -- the title is a diminutive for an Italian word for lullaby. The piece concludes with a scherzo-like Finale that resembles nothing more than a frenzied dance.
Movements:
I. Capriccio (0:00)
II. Ninnerella (5:00)
III. Finale (15:37)